“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
~ David Buckel

Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, manmade greenhouse gases have risen inexorably. If it has not dawned on you by now, our economic and political systems are ill-equipped to deal with this existential threat. Existing international agreements are toothless because they have no verification or enforcement and do not require anything remotely close to what is needed to avoid catastrophe. The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s and Greenland’s pace of ice loss has increased fourfold since 2003. The Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice and total volume of ice in September, the lowest ice month of the year, has declined by 78% between 1979 and 2012. With grim implications for the future, Earth’s air conditioner —the cryosphere— is melting away.

An article from a few months ago lays bare the reality that throughout the past two hundred years and with recent “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources, humans have only added to the total energy they consume without ever having displaced the old, polluting ones. An alternative energy outlook report by Wood Mackenzie foresees that even in a carbon-constrained future, fossil fuels would still make up 77% of global energy consumption in 2040. The world economy remains hopelessly tethered to fossil fuels. We are kidding ourselves if we think there will be any sort of orderly transition to sustainability with which modern civilization appears to be wholly incompatible. We are, as Nate Hagens says, energy blind.

Modern civilization has become so intertwined with petroleum-based products that their remnants are now found in our excrement. It seems no living thing can escape microplastics, not even the eggs of remote Arctic birds. This should come as no surprise if you look at the scale of the problem. Plastic production has grown from 2 million metric tons in 1950 to roughly 400 million metric tons today(more than 99% of plastics made today are with fossil fuels and only a tiny fraction of it recycled). There are five massive oceanic gyres filled with pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other human detritus; one of the these gyres, named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is three times the size of France and growing exponentially. The health and environmental effects are grim; organized society may not even be around to examine the long-term effects of these persistent synthetic materials:

“Health problems associated with plastics throughout the lifecycle includes numerous forms of cancers, diabetes, several organ malfunctions, impact on eyes, skin and other sensory organs, birth defects” and many other impacts, said David Azoulay, a report author and managing attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law…”And those are only the human health costs, they do not mention impacts on climate, impacts on fisheries or farmland productivity.”

Making things more efficient and convenient has its limits, but humans keep trying to beat the consequences of Earth’s dwindling natural resources while ignoring the environmental costs. Jevons paradox be damned! To make matters worse, the fossil fuel industry has employed a well-financed and highly effective global disinformation campaign to confuse and sow doubt in the public mind about the reality of climate change. And to top it all off, we have a leader who reinforces the ignorance of climate change deniers:

It’s a cruel irony that this President’s emergency declaration for building a border wall comes at a time when migration from Latin America is near a 40-year low and the majority of those now seeking asylum are families fleeing climate change-related disasters. This President and the craven politicians who line up behind him are an abomination! At a time when compassion, cooperation, and scientific reasoning are needed to deal with the multiple crises we face, politicians are instead conjuring up xenophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories. As inequality grows and the once-stable climate continues to unravel, expect the super-rich to barricade themselves behind heavily fortified mansions while treating climate refugees and the most vulnerable among us with extreme prejudice. A new study shows increasingly severe weather events are fueling the number of ‘food shocks’ around the world and jeopardizing global security:

These “food shocks” —or, sudden losses to food production— are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications. “Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.”

Hawaii is losing plant species at the rate of one per year, when it should be roughly one every 10,000 years. “We have a term called ‘plant-blindness’… People simply don’t see them; they view greenery as an indistinguishable mass, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals…”

The bedrock of our food, clean water and energy is biodiversity, but its loss now rivals the impacts of climate change. Without biodiversity, our food sources, both plants and animals, will succumb to diseases. Microbes and hundreds of different life forms interact to make soils fertile. Without them, soils will be barren and unable to support life. Monocultures can only be held together through artificial means(fossil fuels, inorganic fertilizer and toxic pesticides) and are highly vulnerable to diseases, yet industrial monoculture farming continues to dominate the globe. Most Worrisome are the recent studies indicating that biodiversity loss raises the risk of ‘extinction cascades’. Insect numbers, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are in steep decline and starfish, a common keystone species in coastal ecosystems, are facing extinction due to some sort of wasting disease likely caused by climate change:

“Many of these outbreaks are heat sensitive. In the lab, sea stars got sick sooner and died faster in warmer water… A warming ocean could increase the impact of infectious diseases like this one…We could be watching the extinction of what was a common species just 5 years ago.”

And here is Professor Stephen Williams discussing the recent mass death of Australia’s flying fox bats in which 30,000 —a third of their remaining population— died in a single extreme heat wave:

“A lot of tropical species are much closer to the edge of the tolerances, so they very much are the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for the world in what’s going to start happening with climate change…The fact that we’re now seeing things endangered occur in places that you would’ve thought to be pretty secure, that’s the scary bit…I suspect the next wave of extinctions is going to be mostly due to extreme events — extreme climate events like heatwaves.”

These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our eyes!!! Four of the last five mass extinction events were preceded by a disruption of the carbon cycle. When renowned paleoclimatologist Lee Kump was asked whether comparisons to today’s global warming and that of past mass extinctions are really appropriate, he ominously said, “Well, the rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is ten times faster than it was during the End-Permian. And rates matter. So today we’re creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we’re imposing that change maybe ten times faster than the worst events in Earth’s history.” Humans are recreating the past extinction known as The Great Dying at a much faster pace and at many more human-forced levels that leave no ecosystem on Earth intact.

By orders of magnitude, the human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot. The people who have studied this problem for years and from every angle have come to the same conclusion —technology simply won’t save us, but that won’t stop humans from experimenting. By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates.

Humans recognized decades ago the threats they are now facing, yet nothing was done due to political inaction and industry malfeasance which continues to this very day. The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth decades ago were expecting our political institutions to take action back in the 1970s, but they were met with ridicule and now we stand at the doorstep of modern civilization’s collapse. Political inaction and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry appear to be intractable barriers that have condemned the human race to a hellish future. Anyone waiting for some sort of seminal climate change event that is going to galvanize the world’s leaders into action will be tragically disappointed. If seeing the world’s coral reefs dying, its glaciers disappearing, permafrost melting, and the steady uptick in extreme weather and wildfire events does not spur them to action, it is much too late to hope that any single event will ever do so. The time to act would have been before we were seeing all these environmental degradations and tipping points, not afterward. There is no way to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle. The Earth cannot even begin to reach a new climate state until humans stop emitting the roughly 40 to 50 gigatonnes of CO2 per annum and stop altering and destroying global ecosystems. This fact is our daily nightmare.

A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. As we race toward a nightmarish future with no realistic way to stop, we leave behind a “forever legacy” that will haunt mankind for the rest of eternity.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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I thought that everyone knew that once any waste from fossil fuel burning leaves an exhaust,it disappears with no after effects,just like one’s garbage does,once it ‘s placed in a waste container.
Any chemicals that are used in agriculture are naturally eliminated before the next
heavy rain & never enter the food harvest or the environment.

As excellent as your summary of the current situation is, you could add many paragraphs to it. The fossil fuel powered human colossus is changing all aspects of the earth system. It is awesome and terrifying to contemplate.

Excellent, pithy summary – really well-stated and on target.
One man’s cause-suicide, and a nice polite “rebellion” action do nothing, however, against the overmassive, ever-growing process of the destruction of human and animal life.
The corruption and willing criminal predation of our fossil fuel industrialization reaches every institutional corner – judges, faithiests, academic solons, writers, Big Green, tech companies, every last inch of our known world.
Surely someone here will try to rally around some form of hopium…

I’d just like to underline some critical terms that don’t get enough coverage:

(1) runaway feedback loops:

To call them “tipping points,” as so many do, is a pathetic misuse of language. We need stronger terms. “Tipping” sounds like fairies en pointe wearing tutus. “Runaway” at least has the robust virtue of making it clear that these reciprocal processes have become irreversible. We have lost control. It’s out of our hands. And as Mike points out, next to nothing is being done to prepare for the Age of Consequences.

(2) exponential increase:

If something is increasing exponentially, it tells us that we’re in “runaway” territory. The trends are self-amplifying. All those “hockey stick” charts? Take a good look. They mean something, and it’s not pretty.

(3) double-bind:

As Mike says, the consequences of our actions are “baked in.” Even if we quit all fossil fuel use today, the civilization will still collapse and the Great Extinction will proceed apace. But if we do not quit fossil-fuel use, and continue with “business as usual,” the civilization will still collapse anyway and the Great Extinction will proceed apace.

What we need is a clear-eyed courage to meet the storms ahead. We do not need hope-filled fantasies that blind us to the bitter realities and truths. Still less do we need “giving up in despair,” which seems to be all some people can imagine when they begin to comprehend how serious things are.

Thank you for your excellent post. I have been following your blog for years now and I am always amazed how accurately you describe the current state of affairs. Congratulations, It is a pleasure to know that there are people out there who understand and try to warn us about the future.

However, things are much, much worse than just the climate change. We a facing a plethora of crises. In my humble opinion the human race is about to go extinct and there are more reasons than the climate change.

a) Human genome degradation. We managed to escape high child death numbers, which were essential to keeping our species healthy, now this is going to play a very bad trick on us, our genome is rapidly accumulating nefastus mutations, it is just a matter of 2-3 generations before our children won’t be even able to survive without medical treatment right from the moment when they are born. For a large number it is happening already right now.

b) Physical degradation. The use of abundant fossil fuels and electricity resulted in mass obesity and physical degradation. We are much weaker physically than the generations before us.

c) Mental degradation. We just do not realise how fast computer technologies are killing our ability to think. There are multiple research showing that we are losing our cognitive abilities at an alarming rate.

d) Wealth disparity and societal degradation. This is completely unsustainable to have billionaires. In social aspect of our existence we witness involution and degradation of our social institutes.

e) Technological stagnation. Since the invention of nuclear power there have been no major technological breakthroughs in the energy sector. We could not even invent a compact and efficient energy storage device, until today petroleum remains the highest density energy storage available on mass scale.

I can go on and on, uncovering a plethora of crisis in nearly every aspect of human existence, like food quality degradation, a sharp rise of degenerative diseases, biosphere degradation and so on and so forth. Climate is just one aspect of the whole picture.

Conclusions: human race is involuting, we just having hard time admitting it. The imminent demise of our industrial civilisation and human extinction is a logical conclusion to our species’ characteristics: greed, egoism, aggression, etc. A species with such qualities cannot survive at the long run, especially if it learns a pretty damn simple way to produce energy from a primitive chemical reaction. We are a monkey with a hand grenade (our primitive technology). Besides we are only marginally intelligent, 90% of humans just copy each other and practically do not use their brains in their everyday lives. Hence there is absolutely nothing wrong in our species going extinct, as this is the law of evolution, which weeds out the unfit. I am sure that a couple of millions years after we go extinct the Evolution will produce a better, more intelligent species. The planet will recover from us and produce new lifeforms. Hence there is no need in worrying that we are going to go extinct, we deserve it. Life on this planet will continue after we are gone, it is exactly as the case of dinosaurs, they weren’t fir for the environment and got wiped out. Now it is now turn and we should understand and take it with dignity. There is absolutely no point in saving our species, not from the Evolution’s point of view. It knows better.

In geological time, Gaia is entering menopause. It spins slower, It’s getting wider around the middle, tilting and wobbling a bit, rebounding up at the poles, low on magnetic charm, drying up in the mainlands, being gouged on the coasts, and popping out in volcanoes while having severe hot flashes. Imagine a falling droplet of water pulsating and you’ll get the picture. Having slept with a menopausal woman, I can tell you our rest is in trouble.

I remember when laptops didn’t bend. We have a fridge made in 1946, it still works. Maybe always has.

These lists of calamities leave out the growing desecration of landscapes and oceans by “clean energy” projects that can never achieve the scale to replace fossil fuels (even if they could replicate without them). Nor will people tolerate such blight for much longer.

In other words, the biggest efforts to “save the planet” (rather, save civilization) are just adding new layers to ecocide, and the perpetrators can only cry “NIMBY!”.

““My generation and my parents’ generation are those responsible for most of what great-grandchildren will be inheriting, and a lot of it is going to be pretty ugly,” [Ian] Anderson tells Newsweek. “Those who are climate change deniers, like your president [Trump], are unfortunately in a position to continue to do a lot of bad.”

” The world economy remains hopelessly tethered to fossil fuels. We are kidding ourselves if we think there will be any sort of orderly transition to sustainability with which modern civilization appears to be wholly incompatible.”

“ The level of fossil fuel consumption globally is now roughly five times higher than in the 1950s, and one-and-half times higher than in the 1980s, when the science of global warming was confirmed and governments accepted the need to act on it. This is a central feature of the “great acceleration” of human impacts on the natural world. . . .
CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, man made greenhouse gases have risen inexorably.”https://piraniarchive.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/pirani-helsinki-wern2018-paper.pdf

We have soaked our lives and our economies with fossil fuels.

We have ignited global warming.

Some people claim Buckel was mentally ill or emotionally unstable. I point you to Amitav Ghosh, who write how we are all deranged when it comes to climate change. We are on a heedless, irrational, suicidal course that can only be explained by a mass derangement.

When people point out the thoughtlessness of Buckel’s action and how it affects his loved ones, particularly his daughter, I see even this as a mirror to us for all of the ways we do not do enough to ensure our descendants have a safe and stable place to live.

…Under the Green New Deal vision, investment in renewable energy and infrastructure production would be the mechanism for revving up the economy. But whatever shape it takes, this new New Deal would be born into a very different world from that of its predecessor—a world that can’t handle a big economic stimulus. If we are to avoid climate catastrophe, we have to simultaneously bring an end to fossil-fuel burning and develop vast renewable energy capacity, both starting right now and both on a crash schedule. That means the everyday economy must find a way to run on much less available energy.

Analyses purporting to demonstrate otherwise—claiming that current and growing energy demand can be met by 100% renewable generation—rely on overly optimistic technical and environmental assumptions, and on the assumption that today’s huge disparities in energy consumption among and within countries will remain in place.

Research based on more realistic assumptions shows that neither the United States nor the world can satisfy 100% of current, let alone projected, energy consumption only with renewable sources. And there’s no way that even a more modest but still adequate introduction of renewable energy could be achieved within a decade or even two.

Quickly phasing out fossil fuels at a time when renewable sources have not yet been phased in, affluent nations and communities in particular will have to shrink their total energy consumption dramatically while shelling out billions to help fund renewable energy in poor nations.

The Green New Dealers nevertheless are holding out the promise of prosperity and sustainability through growth. Without asking where the energy to fuel that growth will come from, they predict that with heavy investment in renewable infrastructure, the U.S. economy will expand rapidly so that lower-income households can look forward to more, better jobs and rising incomes.

Unlike the World War II stimulus, this new green stimulus will not be accompanied by any planned allocation of resources or limits on production and consumption in the private sector. But that is what’s needed. Given the necessity for an immediate, steep decline in greenhouse emissions and material throughput, such planning and limits are needed even more now than they were during World War II.

In the 1930s, the U.S. and world economies were vastly smaller than they are today, and greenhouse emissions were far lower. Earthlings, all but a tiny handful, were blissfully unaware that continued fossil-fueled growth would one day become a mortal threat to civilization….As far as I know, no one complained at the time about the 65 percent increase in fossil energy consumption that occurred between 1935 and 1945 thanks to the growing economy. Even if there had been prophetic scientists within the growing federal bureaucracy of the 1930s sounding the alarm on future global warming, that carbon would have had to be spent anyway in order to stop the march of fascism…

‘we have to simultaneous bring an end to fossil fuel burning and develop vast
renewable energy capacity…..’
This link has been posted before. Note that to replace all fossil fuel, the numbers
of the construction required need to be multiplied by 2.4.
How exactly is all that construction done,( note also that the energy and material
requirements for all the energy storage and dissipation equipment have to be
added to the link above as well) ,and keep this civilisation functioning in the many
decades required,without using fossil fuels ? Supply constraints for the mineral
requirements alone,even without considering energy, mean that this is just another
techno-optimist delusion.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
And all of that infrastructure has to be replaced about every 30 to 50 years.
Good essay again. Mike.

You already know this, but some great quotes from Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by William Ophuls:

“Civilization is trapped in a thermodynamic vicious circle from which escape is well nigh impossible. The greater a civilization becomes, the more the citizens produce and consume—but the more they produce and consume, the larger the increase in entropy. The longer economic development continues, the more depletion, decay, degradation, and disorder accumulate in the system as a whole, even if it brings a host of short-term benefits. Depending on a variety of factors—the quantity and quality of available resources, the degree of technological and managerial skill, and so forth—the process can continue for some time but not indefinitely. At some point, just as in the ecological realm, a civilization exhausts its thermodynamic “credit” and begins to implode.”

—————————————————————————

“When coal is burned to produce electricity, only about 35 percent of the energy in the coal is converted into electrical energy. The rest becomes waste heat, various gases (such as carbon dioxide), various chemicals (such as sulfuric acid), particulates, and ash. And even the electricity dissipates into the environment as waste heat once it had done its work. From the physicist’s point of view, the books are balanced—there is just as much matter and energy in the overall system as before—but what remains is significantly lower in quality. The upshot is that for every unit of good that man creates using this particular technology, he manufactures two units of bad and even the good is ephemeral.”

———————————————————————————-

“…technological improvements actually increase thermodynamic costs. Take the substitution of the automobile for the horse. To make a horse requires a modest investment in pasture, water, and fodder for he two to three years it takes from conception until the horse can work. But to make a car requires not only many direct inputs—steel, copper fuel, water, chemicals, and so forth—but also many indirect ones such as a factory and labor force as well as the matter and energy needed to sustain them. To use a technical term, the “embodied energy” in the car is many times that in the horse. In addition, the thermodynamic cost of operating the car is greater. A horse needs only a modicum of hay, water and oats procured locally without to much difficulty. But the auto requires oil wells, refineries, tankers, gasoline stations, mechanics shops, and so on—that is, a myriad of direct inputs that are difficult and expensive to procure, as well as a host of indirect costs. So the substitution of auto for horse may have brought many advantages, but at a heavy thermodynamic price.”

Nothing lasts forever, but humankind would do well to find a way to extend the ride. To do so would require a herculean exercise in self-control and sacrifice for long-term gain and good —not a natural proclivity of humans. Barring some technological miracle, there is little reason for optimism.

Thanks for the Ophuls quotes,Mike. They should be read and reread by those who fail to see the difference between the renewable energy systems of the Human
societies which have endured for >50.000 years ,and the ‘Renewable ‘ energy systems being promoted as the saviour for this civilisation. The societies which have endured have relied on solar energy capturers which are self-replicating and do not require mining and manufacturing by humans for their existence.

I doubt if your last sentence is correct. Even if we had a ‘technological miracle’
(by that I assume you mean fusion energy on Earth becoming the energy source)
the other systemic flaws of this civilisation would still mean that it would not last
beyond the end of this century at the latest,and then with a greatly reduced population. You no doubt understand why I say that,so I won’t elaborate further.

“…Under the Green New Deal vision, investment in renewable energy and infrastructure production would be the mechanism for revving up the economy….”

Even if it was mathematically possible to replace fossil fuels with machines built BY fossil fuels, the Green New Deal would be a raw deal for what’s left of open space, birds, bats and rural nights unfettered by noise and red lights.

The GND looks like a futile attempt to train inner city toughs to climb wind turbines and spread mechanical graffiti across the countryside, just as they’ve done on city bridges with spray-paint. I see it as grimly ironic. Being green is also the furthest thing from a potentially reformed drug dealer’s mind, except for dollar-green (like Big Wind chasing subsidies).

Who in their right mind thinks we can “save the planet” by industrializing its last scenic places? That includes offshore wind, as well. The minimum setback in that case is about 30 miles (26 nautical miles) at today’s turbine heights, and it may never be pragmatic. Look into Ocean City MD’s efforts to save their coastal views.

You left out the gorilla in the room, phytoplankton, half gone in my lifetime because of PCB laced Marine microplastic. It is the beginning of the food chain, sequesters CO2 and converts it to most of our oxygen. One billion people rely on our dying oceans. I believe hunger is the greatest motivator of mankind and the starving, migrating, seems will finish us.

Yes, I’m aware of the dramatic drop in Diatoms or Phytoplankton, the base of the aquatic food chain and ultimately all life on Earth. Their shrinking numbers are attributed also to warming and acidifying oceans. There were a couple studies from last year that shed more light on this:

…In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists collected a species of diatom from the ocean and exposed it to increased seawater acidity — akin to the projected ocean acidity levels by the end of the century. They found that more acidic waters hindered diatoms from getting the nutrition they need, specifically iron, for their numbers to grow.

And if diatom populations were to plummet, there would be global implications beyond the sea.

Diatoms float near the ocean’s sunlit surface, and they suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then use this carbon as a key nutrient. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the ocean absorbs 30 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and much of this is consumed by hungry, surface-dwelling diatoms.

The diatoms take in the carbon, but release oxygen — so much so that “Diatoms supply the oxygen in every fourth breath you take,” according to NOAA. Eventually these heavy diatoms sink to the ocean floor, where they naturally “sequester” this carbon far from the atmosphere.

If diatom numbers fall, so might the ocean’s natural ability to gulp carbon dioxide, a potent and long-lived greenhouse gas, out of the air. This could speed up global warming…

…According to the researchers, due to ocean acidification, the carbonate near the ocean’s surface — where most of the acidification is taking place — will decline by nearly 50 percent during this century.

So, although much more research is needed to build upon this initial study, this could spell doom for diatoms in vast swathes of the ocean, particularly seas in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica that are already iron-deficient.

Falling diatom populations can stoke a vicious “feedback loop,” wherein there’s fewer diatoms to suck carbon out of the air and eventually sequester it near the ocean floor. Accordingly, there will be more carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere, further acidifying the oceans and making it more difficult for diatom populations to grow…

…Pepin says over the past three to four years, scientists have seen a persistent drop in phytoplankton and zooplankton in waters off Newfoundland and Labrador.

“Based on the measurements that we’ve been taking in this region, we’ve seen pretty close to 50 per cent decline in the overall biomass of zooplankton,” said Pepin. “So that’s pretty dramatic.”

Scientists say local testing reveals half the amount of plankton in a square metre of water today. It’s not just a problem here, declining plankton numbers are a global phenomenon.

It’s a difficult idea to convey to the average person who might not understand the ocean ecosystem, but Pepin likens it to walking into a grocery store and instead of seeing the shelves full, they’re only half-full…

…”When it persists — for in our case now for three or four years — in the back of my mind, at the very least, little alarm bells start going off because it means that something fundamental may have changed in the food web.”…

Newfoundland and Labrador is already 1.5°C warmer than the historical average.

In order to prevent environmental collapse bringing about the death of more than six in every seven humans on the planet, we (all of us) simply have to stop using fossil carbon fuels today.

But if we stop using the fossil carbon fuels that currently provide the world with 85 percent of its power, our highly complex and interconnected oil-dependent economy will crash; resulting in a global famine that will kill more than six in every seven humans on the planet anyway.

I had previously commented that I thought that the process of human extinction would take decades. (Starting from the first mega famine.) At that time I was unaware of the role played by sulfates in the environment that are released by burning coal. Now my expectations are that humans will become extinct much faster than I previously thought. That is actually good news.
There will be less time to suffer.

Two good things happened this week.
Earlier in the week I thought to tap in “survival acres” after what could be years or year,and lo it was there, Jonathan as angry as ever.
And then today “x-raymike79” appeared, at un-denial, under the article hambone had been reading. And so I tapped… collapse of…

I’ve been hoping to help speed the Clever Ape to his end, just so I can ask: How’s one’s political, cultural, religious, societal, economic theologies working out?
Now of course everyone’s right/wrong value system makes them immune to all consequences of theirs & others’ actions & in-actions.

70 years old.Married. I wear the pants in my family. She tells me which pair to wear.
Tried on three pair this morning before she was happy!

Lived in Georgia all my life. Worked in other Southern states. Grew up with outhouses, carrying water from a well, single light bulb hanging in the center of the ceiling with pull chain, hog killings in the front yard, damn fine natural gardens. Moved to Oregon 10 years ago, had enough of Southern Redneck White Trash. One should not talk about their extended family.

Worked for myself in construction, contracting for others.
My sweet spot was building my personal residences, waiting to sell & rebuild to avoid
capital gains & other taxes involved with income. Building for one’s self is a pleasure that not many can & won’t experience.

Pretty much been an independent cuss since I was 21. Been called a SOB, that’s Sweet Old Boy until one gets to know me. 😉

Read too much mythology & philosophy before I realized I could have wasted my time
just wasting time.

One thing that I have is the ability to tell my ego to sit down & STFU, it minds very well.

There are so many brilliant sayings.

Eagles -“Already Gone” lyric:
“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains & we never even know we have the key.”

>1°C global warming was too much:
The first temperature increase limit proposed by scientists was by the 1989 UNEP Advisory Group.
​
• Greater than 1.0°C above pre-industrial levels “may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage”.
• 2ºC increase was determined to be “an upper limit beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems, and of non-linear responses, are expected to increase rapidly”.

​​This was published in 1990 as an international assessment Targets and Indicators published by the Stockholm Environmental Institute, edited by F. Rijsberman and R. Stewart.

The targets were chosen to protect vulnerable ecosystems. Two temperature increase limits were given. 1C was (and is) the limit to avoid loss of global ecosystems like coral reefs and the planets last remaining great forests. It is clear today 1C is very high risk. 2C was cited as an extreme limit with the risks of grave damage to ecosystems and all non linear responses expected to increase rapidly.

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

Australia is experiencing a rapid energy transition & is on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2032 at approximately zero net cost! Most of the developing countries in sunbelt can follow this path too & avoid the damage to the earth's climate.

Stomach Of Dead Whale Contained 'Nothing But Nonstop Plastic'

Mount Everest: Melting glaciers expose dead bodies. Several studies show that glaciers in the Everest region, as in most parts of the Himalayas, are fast melting and thinning.

US climate policy must protect forests and communities, not the forest industry